Mass marketing has gone through a renaissance with the proliferation of new media. Television, radio, and newspaper advertisements as well as coupon mailings have been effective at reaching millions, but do not offer the best engagement with the consumer. Technological advancements (e.g., mobile devices, the Internet of things, etc.) tend to pinpoint the exact moments and needs of consumers (e.g., location, retail searches, concerns, etc.) to supply consumers with the solutions they are looking for at any given moment. Arguably, with recent developments in connected and mobile devices, advertising will progress more in the next few years than it has in the past sixty years.
One current trend is for advertising to become more instantaneous both in terms of how the advertiser contacts the consumer and how the consumer purchases products and services. This is the generally accepted trend that high technology companies like GOOGLE®, YAHOO®, BING®, APPLE®, etc. are endeavoring to exploit. However, this trend simply tends to insert a mass market brand or advertising campaign into the moment automatically triggered by the consumer's actions or location bypassing the local brick and mortar retailer. Thus, no benefit or feedback is gained from the local brick and mortar retailer's hard earned expertise. The final result being of limiting the level of consumer's instantaneous engagement with a “one size fits all” advertising campaign simply inserted into the consumer's experience in an opportune time. Additionally, this technology often has the unfortunate consequence of “sticky” advertising where the instantaneous advertisements persist long after the consumer's moment of interest has expired. Thus, rather than advertising in the moment the consumer is repeatedly bombarded with out-of-date advertising information, which can become annoying.
A better approach is to enable a general mass market campaign to be tailored by local brick and mortar merchants to be more compatible with their micro or nano environments by using knowledge each merchant has accumulated over years of dealing with local consumers. Ideally, this localized knowledge would be coupled to the new technology instantaneous insertion advertising techniques for optimal consumer engagement. Incorporating this local level feedback into a particular macro (e.g., national) advertising campaign has proven to be prohibitively expensive and has also received push back from macro brand managers with concerns of dilution of their overall message or possible diversion off message in a way that might harm the macro brand. Additionally, any such micro/nano/macro must also accommodate funding and payment flow across the advertising hierarchy, which heretofore was not possible to manage at a variety of levels within the brand marketing from macro level to micro level. Amassing such disseminated knowledge and funds processing into an overall campaign much less disseminating it into an instantaneous insertion advertising campaign has, so far, proven to be a technically vexing if not impossible problem.
Thus, it is highly desirable for a new mechanism that has the flexibility to allow each company, its local corporate providers, its independent franchisees, or any subset of these or others to prepare, control/regulate, and execute a homogeneous marketing strategy depending on local circumstances, customer preferences, availability of various advertising media, the effectiveness of that media, and the cost of such execution.